We don’t know what exactly election night will bring, but it’s unlikely that it will be the same straightforward process that has brought us accurate (if unofficial) results before midnight (almost) every other election cycle. And even if things go smoothly, the night is likely to be contentious and stressful for many of us. So let’s plan now.
Get through the day first
Before we even get to election night, we need to get through the day. Perhaps you will be at work, or finding time to vote, or volunteering with get-out-the-vote efforts. If so: let those distract you. Focus on the task to be done.
If you have a long empty day stretching out in front of you, make some plans now to give that time some structure. Exercise, meditation, volunteering, and productive activities like errands or even crafts can all help you expend your nervous energy while you’re waiting.
If you need to vote, make sure to plan for that too. Double check your registration status and your state’s laws. Decide when you’re doing it and how you will get to the polls. Prepare yourself with information on what to do if you’re turned away; in many cases you can fill out a provisional ballot.
Consciously consider your mindset
While you’re doing all this, you may be tempted to brace for the worst. But it can be helpful to engage in cautious optimism, experts have told us. This way you get the mental benefits of allowing yourself to hope for the best. Explain it to your pessimist side this way: if the worst is going to happen anyway, why not enjoy those positive emotions while you still can?
It also helps to think through the possible scenarios. If Trump wins, what will you do? How can you mentally plan for that? What if Biden wins? What if the election is too close to call or is legally contested for weeks or months on end? How will you mentally get through that time? Thinking about best-case and worst-case outcomes can help us feel grounded and prepared no matter what happens.
Understand the possibilities
With record numbers of votes being cast by mail, the process of tallying the results becomes a bit more complicated. Normally, absentee votes are only a small percentage of the results, and it becomes clear by the end of election night who is going to win regardless of the mail-in tally. This year, that may not be a safe bet.
Similarly, television networks and newspapers can usually get a decent handle on numbers from exit polls, which are conducted by simply asking people exiting polling places who they voted for. But if there is a political divide—for example, if Democrats are more likely to vote by mail—then these polls become less reliable.
While all of this suggests that the usual ways of reporting are less reliable than they have been in the past, media outlets may try to spin the situation the opposite way—for example, by trying to predict what will happen based on how many votes have been cast early. In truth, we’ve never had an election like this one before, so nobody knows how early predictions will relate to the eventual results. Keeping all this in mind will help you understand the uncertainty you may feel when watching or reading about the votes as they roll in.
It’s also important to take a step back and remember that watching results being tallied on election night is a media event; it’s not a part of the democratic process. In most states, election results are not certified until several weeks later, typically in late November or early December.
Reduce your stress, or at least try
If you’re worried about election results, this will not and cannot be a normal Tuesday night. Plan out how you will try to keep yourself calm, but also set some boundaries in case your feelings spiral out of control.
One of the things that may help the most is to know who you can talk to. Who do you like to commiserate or celebrate with, and are those the same people, or does it depend on which way you’re feeling? If your spouse or roommates don’t feel the same way you do about the election, you might want to make plans to be with someone else, whether in person or virtually. If you find your support on social media, consider direct messaging individual friends rather than spending all evening doomscrolling on main.
Set up your self-care, whatever that means for you, but be smart about it: If you think the evening might go better with a drink or two, or if weed is how you deal with stress, partake responsibly. If you don’t already have a go-to activity for potentially stressful nights, may I suggest setting up and then taking an elaborately optimized bath?
Give yourself a damn bedtime
When you wake up on Wednesday morning, you will experience whatever Wednesday morning has to bring. Maybe somebody will have given a concession speech during the night. Or, perhaps millions of votes will remain to be counted, the election unable to be called. Also a possibility: there is a presumptive winner, but the candidates and states are gearing up for epic legal battles over the legitimacy of some of the votes.
This situation, whatever it turns out to be, will await you in the morning no matter how late you stay up Tuesday night. Decide for yourself how much bullshit you want to endure, and put a number on it.
Perhaps you want to experience the chaos of election night, because you thrive on drama and disaster and you want to see how people on social media will react. If you’re up until midnight, will that still allow you a reasonable amount of sleep? If you stay up until 2 a.m., and the news is bad, will you feel that your time was well spent? Decide now what is the latest you will allow yourself to stay up. It is important that you trust your not-freaking-out-too-much-yet brain to make this decision, because your 2 a.m.-freaking-out-brain is not capable of knowing when to quit.
Or perhaps you love yourself and want to be as happy as possible under the circumstances. Lights out at 10 p.m. All the fresh horrors will be there for you in the morning just the same.
Do bedtime right
At the very least, you need to turn off your notifications. If you disregard all my advice, the absolute bare minimum, must do is to set your phone to Do Not Disturb at whatever ungodly hour you finally turn in.
But you have time to plan. If an app allows you to shut off notifications at certain times, like Slack, make sure that you’ve set them appropriately. (If you use Slack for work, you should probably have your notifications silenced outside of work hours anyway.) Similarly, you can set your phone to go into Do Not Disturb mode every night, with your closest friends and family members whitelisted in case of an emergency. Revisit your settings now.
Specifically, think through what your phone might look like when you wake up. Do you want to see all the night’s news alerts, or would you rather turn them off? Or maybe you want to turn off everything except one or two outlets’ news alerts. If you fear the worst, you could even prepare for a quiet little morning routine, including breakfast, before you pick up your phone and find out. You can’t control what will happen on election night, but you can decide how much it’s allowed to intrude on your time.